The use of the word post and meta have been applied to the whole nine yards: slapped onto philosophy, art, the highs and lows, the meaningful and the banal. In two metamodernist articles, artist Luke Turner quotes the use of post-something as “post-rock, post-digital, post-human, post-everything. The entropic succession of thesis and antithesis becomes a feedback loop that eludes synthesis” - and yet, he argues that “the increasing compulsion to stake territorial claims for movements and genres is arguably further evidence of the renewed impetus and enthusiasm for cultural and societal progress, driven by the oscillatory spirit of the metamodern age.” But if we are post-everything, what remains that is tangible or relevant?
The Image Object Post-Photoshop
Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo’s recent dystopian short film, Sight, serves as a chilling vision of what might happen if technological advancement were to result in us losing touch with touch itself, our values skewed by technology’s omnipotent helping hand. Here, a swirling animated version of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, superimposed on the wall of the protagonist’s apartment, has truly become banal — art as nothing more than life’s screensaver — and that is surely not a ‘post’ anyone would wish for.
The dictionary states ‘meta-’ as meaning ‘a change of position or condition’, or 'denoting position before, after or beyond’. If post- is after, then meta- is certainly beyond - but beyond what, exactly? Somewhat, somewhere over the rainbow, there is a something that we are trying to grasp as it seeps through the cracks in our fingers and eludes meaning.
Some, like digital creative James Bridle, whose “eponymous tumblr feed, an ever-expanding archive of technology-related imagery”, created in 2011, “set out to document evidence of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between man and machine, revelling in the often-unexpected beauty that arises when the human-digital divide is ruptured. A cornucopia of glitches, pixelations, render ghosts, face recognition failures, GPS anomalies and countless other digital artefacts serve to introduce novel visual forms, beguiling us with their strange, alien allure.” Thus instigating the New Aesthetic, a rubbish name that means nothing and everything in itself, which is, perhaps, the whole point.
The New Aesthetic’s Speculative Promise
What is the promise of the New Aesthetic, and what can it give us? Consider Luke Turner’s enlightening observation:
Contemporary network culture facilitates the proliferation and transformation of imagery at an unprecedented and exponential rate. Our experience of the present has come to reflect the bewilderingly complex and diffuse temporal terrain in which we now operate. We no longer simply partake in a blinkered march towards the future, consigning the past to the scrapheap like some unloved beige-boxed bundle of obsolescence. We are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. We blissfully relive the 8-bit primitivism of a bygone age, preserved forever by the endless archival capacity of the internet, whilst utilising those same networks to shape the fantastical landscapes of tomorrow. We conflate the mechanical idiosyncrasies of disparate eras, basking in the hazy, saturated glow of Hipstamatic analogue simulations that render digital ugliness beautiful, whilst enjoying all the ease and immediacy of the modern cameraphone. Furthermore, we harbour nostalgia for a past-future, one that never came to pass, for the promise of flying cars, jetpacks and hoverboards that failed to materialise (but that we secretly hope still might). We are thus cynics, and yet eternal optimists, our technologies driving our melancholia and invention in equal measure. The emergent metamodern condition allows us to face all directions in time at once, oscillating between the promises and pitfalls of the past, present and future. What is ‘new’ today is thus this empowering simultaneity as a position in and of itself, for which a potential new aesthetic might in part stand.
Blogs such as The Gnu Aesthetic and New-Aesthetic.tumblr.com, the latter of which is coordinated by the “founder” himself, James Bridle, attempt to collect research and data that allow us to organise and perceive a new way of seeing the world. As Bridle states, “The New Aesthetic is not a movement, it is not a thing which can be done. It is a series of artefacts of the heterogeneous network, which recognises differences, the gaps in our overlapping but distant realities.”
The New Aesthetic has certainly proved itself to be a thing, and a thing of considerable value at that. The notion of newness acts as a byword for action, a call to arms. Yet at the same time it is entirely unsure of itself, of its goals. It jitters around, collecting and discarding ideas as it sees fit, creating loose associations, unaware of the full implications of those connections. It is a truly metamodern phenomenon, embodying a newfound impetus to speculate, to remain unresolved.
Robot readable world from Timo
There is a strand within the newly emerging Speculative Realist philosophies called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) that seeks to place all objects, rather than man alone, at the centre of existence. Its speculations attempt to escape what has become known as the correlationist trap, described byQuentin Meillassoux in After Finitude as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”
In other words, as Turner puts it, a “principle concern” of the New Aesthetic is the question of “what is it like to be a thing”?
[…] as Bogost puts it, “all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally.”[x] Far from signalling a bulldozing of hierarchies that would threaten our own place in the world, OOO instead attempts to offer a means by which we might begin to map out the myriad complexities of all existence. As Levi R. Bryant explains, “we need to recognize the inequalities among objects, the degree to which they unequally affect the world about them, if we are to properly understand the being of beings.”[xi] Thus, he argues, “the point is not to stop thinking about humans…but rather to start thinking about the role nonhumans play in organizing our social relations in particular ways.”[xii] As the aforementioned Jaguar advert eventually concludes of machines, ultimately “they are not us.”
The question of what it is like, rather than what it is, to be a thing: a simile, a metaphor, to use visual and written imagery to describe the visceral perceptions of alien others:
Through an engagement with metaphorism, Bogost demands that a new aesthetic should create “fictions that speculate about the aesthetic judgments of objects. If computers write manifestos, if Sun Chips make art for Doritos, if bamboo mocks the bad taste of other grasses—what do these things look like?”
sludge manifesto from benedict drew
Works such as Sludge Manifesto (2011) employ a playful, extreme anthropomorphism in order to explore the question of technology’s innermost desires. Anthropomorphism here, in its role as metaphor, is exaggerated not simply in order to reveal the absurdity of a technological animism. Rather, it facilitates the fantasy of experiencing an alien phenomenology, as if we were somehow granted access, through which we might begin to apprehend the very notion of its existence.
Other interesting Vimeo works that play with the limits of technology:
Urban Abstract from MUSUTA Ltd.
unnamed soundsculpture from Daniel Franke
Spherikal from Ion on Vimeo.
But why, one might ask? Why should we care? Aside from the points made by Bryant in the quote a few paragraphs above, I think the relevance to my own practice and my searching for answers as a human being in a society submerged in visions (and realities) of transhumanist technology refers to our increasingly uncertain place in the world… is it not, therefore, “natural” to begin to question the position of our position, or, as Bryant states, the “being of beings”?
I don’t think the New Aesthetic can ever have a manifesto or a true “purpose”, but I think the creation of such a term has allowed for a series of creative events, collections and discussions about the way to move forward in our digital age, and what it means to move forward - or, simply, what it means to mean:
The New Aesthetic has already moved well beyond its original scope. It is now left to us to steer this vessel, with the continuing accumulation of opinion indicating that further exploration is deserved. The central paradox remains how we might ever begin to actually think or sense outside of ourselves. Is it at all possible to conceive of an aesthetic entirely alien to our own experience: a truly new aesthetic? Our best chance of success likely lies within some combination of the metaphorical and the performative. To invoke Wittgenstein once more, must we remain silent about that which we cannot speak? The answer is surely a resounding no, for here it has always been art’s promise, nay its duty, to speak the unspeakable.
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